


that which ye cannot put down

by cumaeansibyl



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angel and Demon True Forms (Good Omens), Body Horror, Crisis of Faith, Eldritch Abominations, Ghosts, Haunting, Horror, M/M, Metaphysical Sex, Monsters, Multi, Other, Summoning, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:35:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27213532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cumaeansibyl/pseuds/cumaeansibyl
Summary: Crowley's been tapped to collect some damned souls who've been avoiding Hell in favor of haunted-house tomfoolery. It's no fun, but any demon worth a salt line can handle a couple angry ghosts with all their eyes shut.If, of course, that's what's really happening here.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 60
Collections: Trickety-Boo! Exchange





	that which ye cannot put down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [slateblueflowers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slateblueflowers/gifts).



> My fic for the GO-Events Discord Halloween exchange. Hello! Hope you like it!
> 
> According to the Halloween event rules, this fic is Spooky Rating 3, or Maximum Spook. Assuming I've done my job right, this should be pretty creepy on both a visceral and an existential level.
> 
> Title comes from my favorite Lovecraft line, in _The Case of Charles Dexter Ward_ :
>
>> I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you.

“Ghost-hunting,” Crowley said with an apologetic grimace, leaning around the big shelf that blocked the register from customers’ view. “Gonna have to take a rain check on that lunch — pulled the short straw, you know how it is.”

Aziraphale did. Ghosts were an infrequent but potent annoyance for Earth-bound agents, requiring a good deal of time, though perhaps not skill, to handle. Angels, at least, had the satisfaction of helping lost souls find the way to Heaven; demons, as Aziraphale understood it, usually dealt with souls who knew exactly where they were headed and had no intention of going there.

“Oh, bad luck,” he said. “You’ll let me know when you’ve finished, won’t you?”

“Or you could, uhh — it shouldn’t take long,” Crowley said, looking anywhere but at him, “and we can go to the old Goat after, for that chicken and mushroom pie you like?”

The suppressed hope in his voice, the way he’d asked without asking, went straight to Aziraphale’s heart. Since their meeting in the church a decade ago, they’d both felt a fragile sense of connection that they feared to disturb, either by too much closeness or not enough. After having parted in anger, it might be time to choose their reunions, rather than leaving them to chance; to move toward each other, rather than waiting to be moved.

“South Kensington, then?” Aziraphale said. “Ooh, they’ve got those new aluminium cars on the District line.”

“ _I’ve_ got a car, angel,” Crowley protested, but Aziraphale was already hunting up his pocket map; the demon sensibly elected to give in, thus preserving his right to complain the whole way there.

——

On a wide quiet street, otherwise notable for the expensive modesty of its Georgian homes, they found their destination without even checking the house number: a faded, slouching thing, with blind-cracked windows and black mold climbing up the siding like a progressive skin disease. “That must be it,” Aziraphale said. “I’ve never seen an abandoned house look this bad without ghosts in.”

“Think they do it on purpose,” Crowley said. “Keeps potential buyers out. Would you want to deal with that roof?”

“Oh, and the water damage, dreadful.”

Inside, the house was a good ten degrees colder than outside, and the shadows seemed to move when neither was looking at them directly. These were signs familiar from other hauntings, along with the rocking chair that creaked uncannily when they walked past, the grandfather clock chiming out of time, and the inevitable stack of suspect books.

“Have a look at this,” Aziraphale said, pushing aside a pulp magazine whose cover depicted a young woman fending off the advances of some sort of land squid. Underneath it was a cheap hardcover edition of something calling itself _Of the Cults Unspeakable,_ with a wobbly pentagram stamped in red on the cover.“One of yours?”

“Nope, this is human work.” Crowley had specialized for a few centuries in false grimoires, full of overwrought nonsense and rituals that occasionally did summon demons but never bound or commanded them, much to the dismay of would-be necromancers. Aziraphale had done his part by removing the books with really nasty rites, the sort that got innocent people killed, from circulation; if he kept them in a locked case rather than disposing of them properly, well, one had certain feelings about book-burning even when it might be practical. “Definitely fake, though, look.”

Aziraphale looked at the title page Crowley held out to him, and snorted. It was one of the transparently fabulist “tomes” the authors of weird fiction doted on, allegedly “translated and updated” by perhaps the grubbiest little hack practicing in that market. “Really,” he sniffed. “You know, if we hadn’t come here for ghosts, I would say we’re dealing with some extremely credulous pagans.” 

“Wouldn’t mind that,” said Crowley. “Just pull a monster face and they’re out the door. But that portrait over the mantel’s definitely following us with its eyes, so I think we’re stuck with ghosts.”

“Pity.” Aziraphale took the book from Crowley gingerly, not with the caution of a bibliophile or an occultist, but rather as if it might give him a disease. “I suppose it’ll do as a prop if we need a little panto. Brandish it about, intone something suitably portentous.”

“I cannot imagine you being portentous,” Crowley said, smiling.

“Well, I try not to be. It’s exhausting.” Aziraphale smiled back. “Shall we split up? I can take the attic and first floor.”

“Gosh, angel, I don’t know about that.” Crowley wiggled his fingers in what was probably meant as a spooky gesture but looked more like a threat of vigorous tickling. “Aren’t you scared something might sneak up on you, all alone in a _haaaunted hoooouuuuse?”_

“Stop that,” Aziraphale said, a little surprised at the fondness in his own voice. He turned to head for the stairs, hoping to hide the flush in his cheeks. A floorboard creaked behind him, but he already knew what was coming, and he didn’t turn around.

“Boo!” Crowley popped up behind him and grabbed his shoulders.

“Oh!” the angel exclaimed, laughing. “Really, Crowley, if this is what passes for demonic menacing technique these days…”

“State of the art.” Crowley dropped his sunglasses down his nose, winked outrageously, and darted off toward the kitchens.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale murmured to himself, without noticing it.

—— 

He went straight up to the attic first, where he found the usual mysterious locked chest (moth-eaten linens), some children’s toys with sad sinister faces, and a colony of somnolent flies. The first-floor bedrooms were mostly empty, cobwebbed and drifted with dust, warm sunlit air struggling through broken windows in a vain effort to cheer up the chills and shadows. There were rather more spiders than one might expect, and Aziraphale spared a miracle to send them all up to the attic to hash things out with the flies, feeling obscurely as though he’d helped improve the property.

He was just heading back to the ground floor when the bottom dropped out of his stomach, a sickening jolt so like missing a step on the stairs that he had to clutch at the bannister to reassure himself he wasn’t falling. Knowing Crowley for so many years, he’d developed an instinctive sense of when the demon was in danger, but of course a demon often _was_ in danger; even a routine visit to Hell could hardly be called safe, and Aziraphale had rather been on pins and needles until he’d learned to distinguish between imminent peril and the ambient hazards of demonic existence.

He forced himself into motion, nearly overbalancing on his way down, gasping and half-blinded by the nauseating fear that Crowley’s very existence was at stake. Back and forth he went, from room to room, he couldn’t find the cellar stairs, he’d been through here twice already, why was he so _useless_ , what if it was already too late and Crowley was dead because he couldn’t find the thrice-damned _stairs —_

Finally he skidded on a moth-eaten area rug and slammed into a door he could swear he’d opened before, except this time instead of a linen closet he saw a set of narrow stairs descending into darkness. It was anything but safe, but he plunged forward regardless, almost crying in frustration. If they’d come this far only to lose each other now, now after so long apart...

He stumbled to a stop at the bottom of the stairs and pulled light from the air. What it revealed was such a jumble of mundane and bizarre that for a moment he could only stare and wait for it to make sense. In every way it was an ordinary cellar, unusual only in its relative cleanliness; the low ceiling had been cleared of cobwebs, and the stone floor scrubbed. Someone had chalked a basic summoning circle there, and within it writhed a great serpent, twisting slowly over and around itself, its coils making soft melting shapes that flowed one into another. Aziraphale watched it a moment, catching his breath, and then found he couldn’t look away; the movement was so fluid, the shapes so unpredictable and yet sweetly inevitable, drawing ever closer to some revelation of impossible form beyond form, some ancient sigil instinct with unfathomable secrets —

“Aziraphale!” the serpent said. “Look away!”

Aziraphale shook himself and looked down, finding with some alarm that his toes were only inches from the outer border of the circle. “What on earth are you doing, Crowley?” he said, annoyance shouldering aside his fright.

“What’s it look like,” Crowley said, equally annoyed. “Interpretive dance, innit?”

“Well, stop it.”

“Think I’m not trying?” Crowley let out a long hiss that sounded like a groan. “Can’t even stay human-shaped, something’s — _pulling_ me.”

“Satanists after all,” Aziraphale harrumphed, and took a handkerchief from his pocket. “I shall have to have a talk with them — let me just get you out of this.”

“No, don’t!” Crowley cried. “You’ll let it out!”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, what now?” Aziraphale said sourly. “You’re running some sort of confidence trick and you don’t want me fouling it up, is that it? Why did you even invite me if you were going to get up to this sort of thing?”

Crowley hissed in frustration. “You can’t for a _second_ give me the benefit of the doubt, can you? You really think I’m behind this?” 

“You’re a demon in a summoning circle, Crowley, do you really expect me to believe it’s not Satanists —”

“It’s _not_!” Crowley shouted, his eyes flaring with panic. “You never listen to me! Just because I’m a demon you think that’s what this is but it _isn’t! Something else is coming!”_

Aziraphale felt an unfamiliar shiver in his spirit, between his hidden wings. He’d seen what he expected when he searched the house — _exactly_ what he’d expected, to the point of cliché. That should have given him the clue, shouldn’t it? When was the last time a haunting had followed the ghost-story script so closely? 

For that matter, the idea that Crowley, who’d written Hell’s manual on swindling overambitious sorcerers and personally dragged that old beast Aleister[1] into the Abyss for his temerity, had found himself at the mercy of some amateur’s first-order Solomonic circle...

Aziraphale opened his other eyes.

The shadows around them roiled with pallid colours, strange forms swimming in the depths like shoals of unclean fish. A hand of no common skill had carved the lines of the containing circle into the stone floor, and blood-red fire, or burning blood, coursed in the arcs and sigils of a symbology that escaped even Aziraphale’s erudition. This was no half-accidental teenage lark, and it wasn’t a clan of dilettantes seeking a grubby little thrill. “Oh dear,” he said aloud. “This is something very different.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” Crowley looped twice over his own back, a dry, hypnotic hum rising from his scales. Aziraphale saw, now, the shadow of what had been summoned; it hadn’t manifested fully, but it had taken hold of Crowley somehow, forcing him into those hideously suggestive contortions. “They’re trying to reach _something_ , but it isn’t me or anyone I know. I think I’m the _sacrifice._ ”

“But this is a false grimoire, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, holding up _Of the Cults Unspeakable_. “You couldn’t summon so much as an imp with this trash, not if you wanted to ever so.”

“You know what happens if you leave a door open?” Crowley said. 

“The heat gets out?” Aziraphale said. 

“ _No_ , the heat doesn’t — well, it does, but that’s not the point, the point is things get _in_. Things you didn’t intend, like flies and burglars and evangelists.”

“That’s why you’ve really been meddling with the humans’ books,” Aziraphale realized. “Not to keep them from summoning _you_ — to keep them from summoning other things.”

“Some doors don’t go anywhere important. Some of them could go _anywhere_.” Crowley’s whole body suddenly stiffened, rigid in a way snakes should never be, and Aziraphale saw stark terror in his eyes. “No!” he shouted. “Stay out! You can’t come here!”

“He comes! He comes!” a voice called above Aziraphale. He turned, but the speaker was too fast for him, and he saw only a thread of bilious green in the corner of his eye.

“He comes! He comes! The great Bokim comes!” The strange liquid atmosphere suddenly boiled over with a multitude of eyes and hands and mouths, clamouring in shrill whistling voices, reaching for Aziraphale. 

A human might have recoiled at the sight, even knowing logically that spirits can’t harm the living, but Aziraphale had dealt with the restless dead and felt no fear. Powerful they must be, to have constructed this circle and then concealed it so well, but he doubted they knew what sort of ghost hunters they’d lured into their haunted-house trap.

“You slimy little bastards!” Crowley hissed. “When I get out of here —”

“Fat chance,” a third voice laughed. “Prince Bokim’s going to _crush you_.”

“I’m afraid I must ask you to release my colleague,” Aziraphale said politely. 

“Fuck off with that,” the first ghost, who seemed to be their leader, said. “You know how rubbish it is being a ghost? You live forever, but what kind of life is this?”

“Can’t eat, can’t fuck, can’t even take a good shit,” another agreed.

“This Bokim bloke, he’s gonna give us new bodies, with all sorts of powers ‘n such.” The ghost swept forward from the mists, shaping itself into a pale broad-shouldered man, looming over Aziraphale with burning eyes. Aziraphale supposed it would all be very intimidating to a human being, but as it was, he felt a little embarrassed for them both. “We’re going to be lords of Hell!”

“Oh, I very much doubt that,” Aziraphale said, with a glance at the still-circling serpent. “Bokim, was it? Correct me if I’m wrong, my dear —”

“Yeah, not one of ours,” said Crowley.

“Not one of _anyone’s_ , that I’m aware of.”

"Don't speak of things you know nothing of, foolish mortal!" the first voice laughed. "The great Prince Bokim has power beyond your reckoning!”

“What part of ‘turned into a great fuck-off snake’ says ‘mortal’ to you?” Crowley grumbled, but the other spirits were excited now, and only Aziraphale heard him.

“Bokim has all power in Hell and on Earth!”

“Bokim is mighty! All hail!”

Aziraphale had always hated demonstrations, but these people really were very irritating, and he needed time to consult their stupid little book; he’d never tried to disrupt a ritual conducted by the damned, and there might be complicating factors he couldn’t predict. He frowned and shook his head. Well, there was nothing for it. If Crowley wanted to scold him for overdoing it he would gladly submit — _after_ he got him out of there safely.

He shook his head, drew a deep breath, and lifted the book in an apotropaic gesture. “ _You fools!_ ” he trumpeted, his voice resounding through the miasma in visible ripples. Mindful of the low ceiling, he brought out his wings with a satisfying _snap_. _“I have walked this world for lo these many millennia —”_

“‘Lo,’” Crowley snickered.

“— do be quiet, my dear — _and I say unto you, you have been seduced by false gods!”_

“What the _fuck_ ,” someone said. The air roiled with spectral dismay. 

“Our god is real!” the leader roared in his face, his voice like a furious wind. Aziraphale blinked quizzically but didn’t flinch. “Realer than your doddering old Jehovah and his dead son!”

“Well, you see, that’s the problem,” Aziraphale said, giving up on the echo effect. “What you called is very real, but it’s not what you asked for.”

“Huh?” the ghost said, brought up short.

“Whatever you idiots are bringing down on yourselves,” said Crowley, “it’s not from Hell.”

“But then how come you got turned into a snake?” someone asked.

“I _am_ a snake, you pillock!” Crowley reared up, his neck swelling and spreading like a cobra’s hood. “I _am_ from Hell and if you’ve got any sense at all you’ll come back there with me like Satan intended, because what’s coming for you’s a lot worse than Him.”

“Then why don’t we make a deal with it? If it’s so powerful and all.”

“Fuck, no, that’s not what I —”

“Yeah, why not? Hey! Whatever your name is!” the leader shouts. “We summoned you, now give us what we want! New life! New bodies!”

“Stop!” Aziraphale cried. “You don’t know what —”

“Let us serve you in _your_ kingdom!”

“ _No!”_ Crowley howled. The air itself seemed to give way with a great tearing sound as the otherworldly force that had tormented him crossed the last barrier, summoned by those foolish words. The very makings of reality writhed around them for a dizzying moment, juddered sharply to the left, then snapped back into something resembling the world Aziraphale knew — and he, who had thought he had no fear of the dead, very nearly screamed when he saw what had become of the ghosts who’d brought them here.

Something of God’s image still remained to them: enough to show how very, very far they had left it behind. The angel’s mind reeled, trying to understand what he saw in anything like familiar terms. Had God ever meant such things to see the light and live? A flat, round face, skin eaten into holes, a wild eye pulsing in each; clawed fingers of nine, ten, twenty joints, tangled in their own coils, scrabbling helplessly for purchase; the anguished eyes and brow of a human face, everything below the cheekbones consumed in a black, bubbling void; a limbless striated thing like a flayed torso, but bruise-blue and choking on the air of an alien world. 

The spirits of the damned had demanded new bodies, and their request had been granted, according to their master’s nature. “God in Heaven,” Aziraphale whispered, backing away as they crawled and writhed and stalked toward him, back toward the circle where Crowley now lay half-stunned, groaning in pain. “What have you done?”

A sudden sharp pain in his left hand shook him out of his daze. A ring of teeth — _just_ teeth, no face or body — had sunk deep into the meat of his hand, worrying at it like a dog. He cried out in disgust and shook it off, wishing dearly for a cricket bat. No time for research now, no time to plan or to pray. These wretched once-human souls, bound to lunatic flesh, had scented his blood. He was just going to have to take a chance, and God help them both if he’d guessed wrong.

“Angel, don’t!” Crowley cried, rousing as Aziraphale turned to face him, but it was too late. The angel squared his shoulders, gripped the book in both hands like a shield, and crossed into the circle.

His corporation drops away from him and he unfolds like the petals of a chrysanthemum, endless crystalline wings spinning in the sacred algorithm of Grace. Here he exists in his original serene wholeness, as he came from the hands of the Almighty, a divine equation flawless and infinite. 

Humans might call it the fifth dimension, or the astral plane, but to angels this is merely _the world_ : God’s ultimate reality, the darkness without form or void out of which She called the fires of creation, a perfect sphere in every conceivable dimension. It’s never occurred to Aziraphale to wonder if this is all there is; there can’t possibly be anything _more_ than everything. 

And yet there must be dimensions inconceivable, a world beyond the world, because the thing holding Crowley in its thrall is not God’s creation. 

He can only perceive it in pieces, the way it forces the writhing Moebius serpent of Crowley into its blasphemous geometries, the way Crowley’s flames rage against it only to shatter into prismatic fragments of unendurable colours. He can’t comprehend the full shape of it, a monstrous derangement corrupting this place of refuge.

 _Get out!_ Crowley hisses, but underneath Aziraphale can hear the dissonant shriek of this thing, this outsider infecting him. It’s expanding, or rather clawing its way further into this world, digging foul tendrils into the demon’s occult essence like a parasite — because it can’t possibly exist here on its own, Aziraphale realizes, just as he and Crowley can’t exist on the material plane in their true forms. 

The simple infinity Aziraphale embodies is nothing, is a child’s fantasy of _forever and ever,_ before this eight-dimensioned fractal atrocity from a world without sanity or salvation. What of his Creator, who he’d once thought almighty? What can She do but hide Herself away, cowering in a bubble too insignificant to be worth the trouble of breaking, one mote adrift in an unthinkable cacophony? And if that world lies beyond this, what greater worlds might lie farther still?

Closer he drifts, revolted and compelled in equal measure as the outsider spins its insidious song of knowledge beyond good and evil, realms beyond time and space. Aziraphale fears that to comprehend that pandemonium would end him entirely, and yet he yearns for that instant of utter clarity, even at the brink of destruction. He can feel the radiation of alien stars, he can hear the whisper of secrets even God has never known, he wants to _see —_

 _Aziraphale!_ the demon screams.

The terrible droning fugue in his head breaks up into senseless noise at the sound of that voice: Crowley’s last defiance, spent in the effort to save him, as Crowley will always give him his last and best. Fool that he is, what did he think that thing could show him that would mean more than this?

 _He belongs to me,_ Aziraphale says now. Herustles his wings, as if shaking off polluted waters, and shines out like the sun. _Release him before I cast you into the outer darkness whence you came._

 _Don’t,_ says Crowley, even as he struggles against the outsider’s grip. _Don’t do this for my sake, don’t let it take you too._

 _This world is mine,_ Aziraphale calls, every feather a blazing sword, _and you are of the world, and I claim you for my own._ He reaches out to Crowley through the thing’s ganglionic web and they meet, Aziraphale’s absolute-zero purity entangling with Crowley’s unbound entropy as they hover between the World and the Creation, flirting with the annihilation of total union, a hundred states in superposition

as Aziraphale rings out in harmonics that send luminescent fractures sparking all along his crystalline lattices, Crowley licking into the cracks with greedy tongues of flame, spreading the angel open wide to twine his sinuous infernal substance about the sacred core, striking showers of incandescent sparks;

as Crowley shows his quivering red belly for Aziraphale’s blades to pierce through and through, gold spilling from a thousand throbbing wounds, the great serpent transfixed by divinity for one eternal instant before he writhes free, pulling himself into gaudy shreds for the sheer euphoria of unmaking;

as Aziraphale dissolves into a sea of radiance and draws Crowley inexorably under his tides, rolling over and into him in ever-expanding swells that fill him deep and wide, coursing through his veins, beating under his skin; sliding up his body in many-tongued mouths that lap at his thighs, his belly, the soft swell of his breast; taking his mouth in rhythmic, sucking kisses that draw his heart out between his teeth, all the voices born to sing Alleluia whispering _mine, always, always;_

as they chase the pleasure mounting up and up through every plane, through the stately revolution of stars and the frantic excitations of quantum fields and the friction of skin sliding slow and firm against sweat-drenched skin, until the shockwave of their climactic fission rocks the universe, scatters the outsider’s unspeakable essence like a thousand thousand sparks that starve into oblivion. 

They lay where they’d been tossed back into the material plane by the recoil, stunned by a dizzying collapse into three dimensions and a perfectly mundane impact on hard stone. Aziraphale didn’t dare to move until he was certain the floor against which his cheek rested was horizontal, but he noted with some relief that he was fully clothed. 

“Blph,” said the demon lying on top of him, who now had elbows and knees and feet, all of which seemed to be digging into Aziraphale’s tenderest places somehow. 

“Yes,” Aziraphale said. He shifted Crowley off his back and sat up. The cellar was empty, and he could tell at once that they were alone in the house; the poor souls who’d sought to serve in Hell had gone wherever their new master had called them. The air was stale and dusty, but it still felt purified, somehow.

The stone around them had melted, as if by some titanic force from the earth’s core, and the summoning circle was gone. Nor could Aziraphale find his copy of the book that had started it all, but that didn’t surprise him much.[2]

“Did you know?” Aziraphale asked at last.

“There was a… an incident in Constantinople, about nine hundred years ago,” Crowley said. “The Patriarch hushed it up and we all just...” He wiped his mouth with a trembling hand. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“I can’t imagine I would have believed it,” Aziraphale said.

“I never wanted you to know,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale saw there were tears in his eyes. “I was hoping you’d never… because I don’t know how anything means anything anymore, and I didn’t want you to, to…”

“Oh, my dear.” Aziraphale hesitated for a moment — they hadn’t touched in _these_ bodies, really, whatever they’d done otherwise — and then slipped his hand around the back of Crowley’s neck, pulling him forward until their foreheads met. “Can’t you feel it? If my understanding of God’s place in the universe has changed, my faith in Her hasn’t.”

“It’s that easy, is it?”

“Not at all,” Aziraphale said, and they both laughed, a little ruefully. Crowley pulled back to look him in the eye.

“If it’s hard, don’t pretend it isn’t,” he said. “You can’t.”

Aziraphale cupped his sharp jawline with tender fingers, thinking of how Crowley must have learned that lesson. “I don’t know how anything matters anymore either,” he confessed. “I just know that it has to. Because — oh, because —” And he kissed the demon then, a soft fervent press of lips, reaching blindly for all the meaning that was left to him now.

Crowley touched his cheek when they parted, sadness and hope finding an uneasy peace in his face. “I think that’s enough to go on with.”

**Author's Note:**

> I am never writing cosmic horror again. Too many _fucking adjectives_.
> 
> My main goal was to get through this without using the word "eldritch" or giving anyone tentacles, and I succeeded. What's the point of making up new monsters if they're all just going to be squids, I ask you.
> 
> Many thanks to [fenrislorsrai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fenrislorsrai) for the beta, and thanks as always to my fic gremlin [voidbat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidbat) for their unstinting support and affirmation.


End file.
